Maverick Welsh is a young first-time candidate who exceeded expectations in his initial campaign. I most certainly do expect we’ll see him run for office again.
“I absolutely will run for council again,” Welsh said. “I had way too good a time, met too many wonderful people. I saw too many issues around the city to just go away. I will absolutely run again, I just don’t know when or where it will be.”
The two races he’s looking at closely include giving District H another go in November — due to some changes in polling places he believes could work to his advantage — and running for one of the five At-Large City Council seats.
The At Large races are starting to get a little crowded. There’s a GLBT candidate in each of the two open seat At Large races, so the support Welsh had in this go-round in H may or may not be there for him in one of those. I tend to think a November rematch is unlikely to go any better for the runnerup, but there’s not much history to base that feeling on – pretty much just the 2007 special in which Melissa Noriega beat Roy Morales in June and then again by a wider margin in November – and I’m certainly not going to underestimate Welsh. That said, I wonder if waiting till 2011 and the possibility of a new map that creates a district that joins Montrose and the Heights isn’t the better idea. There are no guarantees that will happen, of course, so it’s as much a gamble as anything else. Worth a mention, though.
Looking back on the race, Welsh said the deck was stacked against him with a large base of institutional support going to Gonzalez. He ran a grassroots campaign, which is one of the reasons he said he did not regret the mail pieces that brought about some controversy in the final week of campaigning.
“I have no regrets at all,” he said. “I don’t believe my mail pieces got personal. Look, I was running against the establishment for District H. Ed had worked in Adrian (Garcia)’s office…I didn’t get personal in the mail, and I think that’s important. You’ve got to look at the race and go with your strategy, and my strategy was that I was the grassroots guy.”
I agree that Welsh was running as the non-establishment candidate, and that the mailers simply reflected that. In fact, I said exactly that when the mailings first came out and caused a stir. I also said I wasn’t sure that was the best strategy in this case. Of course, it’s easy to be an armchair quarterback. I have no idea what, if any, strategy might have worked better. I thought Welsh ran a strong race. I based my vote for him in the first place in part on the fact that I was impressed by the campaign he ran. If and when he does run again, here or elsewhere, it’ll be up to him to figure out how to build on that. I see no reason why he can’t do that, and I look forward to his next effort.